


Complications

by ERNest



Series: Gold Into Rotted Straw [4]
Category: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Related Fandoms, Once Upon a Time (TV), Wonderland: A New Alice - Murphy/Boyd/Wildhorn
Genre: Difficult Decisions, Episode: s02e16 The Miller's Daughter, Gen, Inarticulacy, Tea, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 11:01:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/848758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Queen is dead, the Decree is broken...<br/>and Hatter is still not free.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Soaring

Hatter makes Henry some tea while everyone else tries to protect his grandfather from his grandmother. "It'll be fine, kid," she tells him. It has to be fine. He's one child who still believes. So much so that he let her see the goodness in herself, and so she can't let anything happen to this kid. Hatter soars. She knows what this means. It means she's free. But then again, she knows what this means. It means she's doomed.  
Henry sips his earl grey. He sees Aunt Maddy smile like a prisoner who sees the sun for the first time, and then a cloud passes over her face.  
When she gets the news that Cora is gone, she feels a soaring sensation in her chest – she can finally go home – and then wonders why she is on the ground with her face covered with tears and gross snot. Everything hurts and the quality of light through the window has changed. She has no idea how long she was out of it, but it can’t have been as long as the first time she tried to die. She lifts herself from the floor and even that feels like something breaking. The queen is dead. “Long live the queen,” she says quietly.  
But this isn’t the end that either Edwina or Cora deserved. She should have been facing a worthy adversary, not poisoned by a part of herself she finally got back.  
Hatter walks to the mirror, cleans her face, and puts on her favorite hat. She stands with her palms about an inch from the surface of the glass. The Ultimate Decree is revoked; this will work. She can feel the magic crackling around her hands. Wonderland wants her back, and oh how she wants to meet it again! But there’s something she has to do first. Regretfully, she lowers her hands and walks away from her ticket home. She has a memorial to attend.


	2. Speaking

The mausoleum is not cold enough to freeze her lungs, which means she has no excuse to not speak. So she tries to put her racing mind into a cage of words. “I…” The syllable pulls itself layer by layer from the back of her aching throat, but it is not useless enough to drag anything else in its wake. She tries another pronoun. “You.” The thing that is neither vowel nor consonant swirls itself around her mouth and uncovers another gem, “You were,” but here she must pause again because what /was/ she? The past waits for her to fill it in, and if she is wrong then it is still more silent than she, and so “You were my doom and now you’re gone.” This, the air admits, is true, and she doesn’t know what to say after what is clearly not enough. “So what the hell,” the S sizzles and the H explodes, “Am I supposed to do now? Do I just go back to the ones who don’t want me to return?”  
“You live,” answers another broken shadow, “that’s what you do. God only knows how we’re supposed to manage it.” Now that she knows that her struggle with language has been observed, her throat closes up again and it takes all she has even to nod.


End file.
